5 minute read
January 14, 2026
Obviously, contains spoilers for Mother 3 and Earthbound
Right wing fascists constantly cry that “the world they grew up in no longer exists” while yearning for cardboard cutouts. What this means is that their idealizations of the “old world” (typically either 1930s Germany, or 1950s and 1980s America) are entirely artificial. Fisher stated that those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever. We see this time and time again in popular consciousness through nostalgia-baiting content: sincere embracing of vaporwave’s aesthetics, Stranger Things, the Minecraft movie, Guardians of the Galaxy. For older audiences, they get to bask in the warm glow of a reimagined version of their life, one where they were the Chad football quarterback kissing Stacey under the bleachers, one that didn’t give them lead poisoning. For younger audiences it is ambiguous haunting. There is a deliberate push for this façade of the 1980s especially as a golden age of American culture because it was a peak point of right wing fascism’s oppression. Like Ronald Reagan himself who later began confusing his own life for films he had seen, the hegemonic categories of Americans who were adults and adolescents in this period later reimagined their lives through the lens of John Hughes high school movies. It is entirely necessary for right wing fascists to set in stone their idea of the past in order to silence dissent. The 80s were awesome, you had a mustang. Nothing bad happened, now don’t you see why we need to ret[v]rn? This is the American playbook, one that was allowed to freely normalize ideas of colonialism among generations of schoolchildren through Manifest Destiny. A common talking point among internet leftists is that right wing idealizations of the 1950s entirely mirror the glamorized domestic home and work life depicted in advertising. Fliers at stores, magazines, propaganda posters. Derrida said that to haunt does not mean to be present, an integral idea here.
The longer the human project continues, culture advances slower and recycles itself into nostalgia cycles. The 2010s is a prime example of a decade with little to no cultural advancement, one schizophrenically cobbled together from a delirious past, yet to be experienced. Crowley’s assertions about the Aeon of Horus (1904-) being dominated by childishness and individualism permeate in the contemporary culture, where people chase the dragon that lets them relive their childhood, no matter what the collateral damage could end up being.
Aeon the child comes in the form of Porky Minch, originally appearing in Earthbound/Mother 2 as Ness’ selfish neighbor. Over the course of Earthbound, he becomes increasingly selfish and childlike as he is corrupted by Giygas, a cosmic terror entity and the main antagonist. As Ness matures during his coming of age story, Porky only regresses further into a state of childlike maliciousness which becomes destructive and violent. After escaping, he spends some time travelling throughout time/space before eventually returning. He is constantly looking for a way to reclaim his childhood and recreate it as a comforting experience, and so he becomes the eternal child.
Earthbound’s ending involves the saving of the world and the return of the characters but it is implied that there was a mass apocalypse event sometime between the events of Earthbound and Mother 3. The surviving humans go to the Nowhere Islands where they de-industrialize and return to a “traditional” communal and moneyless society. Porky’s arrival in the Nowhere Islands via time distortion forces the province into the Aeon of Horus as he inflicts his childish wrath on it. In a sense the world is decimated for the sake of “fun, toys, and coddling” – polyester fascism. To the Kafkaesque horror of our protagonist Lucas, the world is transformed into capitalism’s playground. The people of Tazmilly village become [television] dopamine addicts through the happy boxes and the forest is transformed into a nightclub (playground). Showing the destruction that capitalism wreaks upon the environment, animals in the forest are abducted and “reconstructed” into terrifying miserable chimeras for military use and the sake of Porky’s entertainment. One should think about this as a child with toys, particularly paralleling Toy Story which producer Shigeru Miyamoto was heavily inspired by.
Many locations take Lucas through “playrooms” meant for Porky’s use which lean more into being nurseries, marking his age regression as more infant than child. game presents Porky as being physically abused by his father (this is toned down in the English port) and carries that trauma with him, so he is constantly seeking to reclaim his lost childhood. His mother-complex causes him to chase after that warmth and coddling. This is represented by his spider mech placing him in the position of the egg sac, and how he is made happiest by being “unbirthed” in the unbreakable ball, where nobody can ever hurt him again. Jungian thought attributes the formation of a dictator complex as coming from the mother complex and you tend to see this among right wingers, especially men, who tend to be childish, violent, and entitled, and have often themselves been abused by their parents. They end up being aggressive towards other men and possessive towards women. To them, they are the only person in existence and everything must be catered to them specifically.
Capitalism grooms this sort of behavior and its why so many right wingers have experienced clear arrested development in adolescence- The boomers with the 50s and 60s, gen x with the 80s, millennials with the 90s. A non-insignificant amount of zoomers post “kidcore” age regression content recalling a desire to return to an easier life of being taken care of, near indistinguishable from the contemporary editions of fashwave aimed to radicalize children. Fools, don’t you understand that the world you grew up in no longer exists? It’s not that age regression itself is an evil, but are you going to be the little that throws tantrums or are you gonna watch your cartoons in peace? Ness and Lucas have both experienced their coming of age stories, but Porky, at [somewhere between] 1000-10000 years old, withered and grey, has become an egg that cannot even be inseminated. Shigesato Itoi has mentioned that porky would still be in the ball after the heat death of the earth. Maybe he’ll become a buddha in there?
New Pork City reads more like an amusement park kid’s area than an actual hub of activity. It’s essentially made of plastic, complete with cardboard cutouts of [old] world monuments, probably a joke about the superficial nature of tourism. The residents of the city regularly comment on the childish nature of the area and everything is designed to be as celebratory of Porky’s existence as possible in order to coddle him. In the Empire Porky Building, Lucas has to play game show games with a robot version of Porky and just barely lose them, because in order to speak to Porky you must be able to coddle him. Not coddling the entitled fascists destroys your life. Pigmasks serve as your stereotypical Nazi-like antagonists, complete with salutes, while Itoi has clearly designed them to be similar to the stormtroopers from Star Wars. This is a brilliant detail because of how much the nostalgia for Star Wars is a driving force in continuing the spectacle’s phenomenon, which is hijacked by right wing radicalization. As the villagers of Tazmilly become brainwashed by television they embrace the militaristic nature of the Pigmasks and end up working for them, either in the chimera factory or directly joining up as infantry.
In the end they are only rewarded with plastic, formless clay. Once tempted with the fruit, the people can no longer think for themselves, but only care about themselves. They are saved only by magic, otherwise doomed to repeat the same mistakes over again.
